The Ice Cream Girls (38 page)

And I only have myself to blame.

I sit outside in the car for a long time, hands gripping the steering wheel, staring at the front of my house.
Our
house. Eventually, Evan returns to the house, switches on the living room light and flicks shut the blinds. I’m sure he saw me, parked in the residents-only parking bay outside our house, but he pretended he didn’t.

It’s time to go. To leave. I need some sleep. I have work in the morning even though I do not have to get up as early to the take the children to school. I wonder what he will tell them. What he will say about me not being there in the morning? Actually, they’ll probably never know, because his mother will take them to school. But afterwards, when I’m not at home, when I have to leave and return in the morning to act the role of nanny and feed them, ferry them to school, they’ll know.

I could so easily drive to his parents’ place in Haywards Heath. Tell the children it’s OK. Say goodnight, God bless, sleep tight. But that would be all about me, what I want, how I want and need to hold them, to cling to them because they are the two best things that have happened to me. I would be scaring them to make myself feel better.

I pick up my mobile, dial Evan’s parents’ number. His mother answers on the second ring.

‘It’s Serena,’ I tell her, waiting for the coolness to blast down the phone. ‘Can I speak to Verity and Conrad, please?’

‘Of course,’ she says, cool but not unpleasant. Evan obviously hasn’t told her everything. Maybe he’s said it’s just a row. ‘They’ve been waiting for your call.’

‘Mum?’ Verity is first. Her voice is high, strained. She’ll be anxious because her nan won’t let her use the computer for anything other than schoolwork, and she’ll have to go to bed at the same time as Conrad.

‘Hello, gorgeous,’ I say with a smile on my face, but tears in my heart, eyes and throat. ‘Are you OK?’

‘What’s going on?’ she asks.

‘Nothing, sweetie. Your dad and I needed to do something tonight, it was very last minute, so your nan and granddad had to look after you. That’s all.’

‘Oh,’ she says disappointedly, ‘that’s what Dad said. I thought something was happening.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ I say. ‘Now, I’ve got to go, so big kiss and cuddle goodnight.’

‘I’m not a baby!’ she says contemptuously.

‘You’ll always be my baby. Even when you’re forty-five and a mother yourself, in my mind, you’ll always be my baby.’

‘Goodnight, Mum,’ she says, resigned to her fate since I say this to her all the time. ‘See you tomorrow.’

‘Yes, I’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘Here,’ Verity says, handing the phone to Conrad. ‘Don’t stay on there for ever, OK? She’s busy.’

‘Hello gorgeous boy,’ I say to Conrad, feeling the wrench again. I want to be with him. I want to be with both of them. The world doesn’t feel the same knowing I’m not going to be with them any time soon, that we won’t be sleeping under the same roof, sheltered by the same bricks and mortar.

‘Mum, Mum!’ he says, urgently. ‘Nan let us have fish fingers AND sausages AND chips that weren’t made in the oven for dinner. AND we had chocolate mousse on top of chocolate cake.’ I love that Conrad will always tell me things like that. Neither set of grandparents is ever able to get away with anything because he can’t help but tell. Verity was never like that, she was – is – like me, always good at keeping secrets.

‘Wow, that sounds like a big dinner,’ I say.

‘Not really. It’s real food, Nan says. She says that we need to eat real food sometimes because you’re—’ He turns away from the phone suddenly. ‘Nan! NAN! What did you say Mum was? A health fantastic?’ I hear my mother-in-law in the background, dying of mortification. She’ll be standing in the kitchen doorway, tea towel in hand, waving her hand frantically, shaking her head, her white hair bouncing wildly, trying to convey to him that he shouldn’t be telling me that. Those words of dismissive condemnation were not meant for my ears. I have no sympathy: she’s known Con all his life, she knows he’s a veritable tape recorder. ‘Nan said you were a health fantastic,’ he says, having not persuaded his nan to repeat what she said.

‘I think you mean fanatic,’ I say.

‘Yes!’ My whole chest expands when I hear my little boy smile. ‘She said you were always feeding us rabbit food because you were a health fan—’

‘Fanatic,’ I supply.

‘Is that true? Do you always feed us rabbit food? I thought we were supposed to eat lots of vegetables and fruit every day. Is that what rabbits eat? Cos I want to eat horse food if we have to eat like an animal. My teacher at school says you have to eat lots of fruit and vegetables to be healthy. Are you doing something wrong if you’re not giving us real food like Nan does?’

‘No, I’m just giving you different food to your nan, that’s all.’

‘Oh, OK. Are we coming home tomorrow?’ he asks.

‘Yes, sweetheart,’ I reply.

‘OK. Goodnight, Mum. I have to go to bed now. I have to see if I have the sea horse dream again. The horse swam all the way to Australia! And I was on its back. And I didn’t get wet. I want to have that dream again, so I have to go to bed.’

‘OK, gorgeous. Love you, big kiss and cuddle goodnight.’

‘OK, bye.’

And then he’s gone. They’re both gone. My mother-in-law doesn’t bother to speak to me again, I just have the chilling brrr that is the dialling tone.

I know tears are falling down my cheeks, but if I give in, if I have a proper cry now, I will not move from this spot. I will sit here and cry the night away. And that would antagonise Evan further. It’s important I do not do that. If I want him to take me back, if I want to rescue our marriage, I have to do whatever he wants me to. Because if our marriage fails and Evan goes for full custody of the kids, I doubt any court in the land would award them to me with my history. In fact, they may even question the wisdom of anything other than the most basic access. I have to fix my marriage. I love my husband, and I do not want my relationship with my children to become little more than the phone conversations we just had.

I am sitting in the centre of a bed in a hotel near Brighton seafront. It is comfortable enough, the décor is dated but clean and in good repair. It isn’t too pricey – I have to be careful with costs because I don’t know how long I’ll be staying and I’m not sure how Evan will react to me putting it on the joint account.

I sit in the dark, my legs pulled up to my chest, my arms wrapped around them and my head resting on my knees. I am staring at the bundle of silk beside me on the bed. It’s my red silk shirt, wrapped around the sharp knives from my kitchen. Evan wouldn’t hide them every night like he should, so I had to take them.

He’s going to be so mad if he wants cheese on toast for breakfast tomorrow. But if he would put them out of harm’s way like he should, then I wouldn’t have been forced to steal them.

I hide the knives because of
him
, of course. Sometimes it seems everything I do for safety is because of
him
.

‘If you ever leave me, I’ll kill you,’
he
whispered, his eyes narrow, slitted peepholes to the venom in his soul. He held a small all-purpose kitchen knife with a serrated edge and black wooden handle against the smooth piece of skin at the centre of my throat, so close I was too scared to swallow in case it caused the knife to peel back my skin. ‘I’ll slice your throat wide open. No one else will ever have you. Do you hear me?’

I did my best to nod without moving my neck or throat. I could not manage it and I felt the cool touch of the blade on my skin. ‘Yes,’ I managed to push out through my stiff, scared lips.

‘Good.’ He whipped the knife away suddenly and was laughing, his big, booming laugh. ‘I’m only messing with you!’ he said while tossing the knife on to the kitchen table. ‘I’m only joking. Oh, God, Serena, you know I could never hurt you. Never in a million years would I ever do anything to hurt you,’ he continued as he played with one of my plaits, twirling it around his little finger. ‘Darling, I love you. I could never, ever hurt you.’

We both knew that wasn’t true. And we both knew he wasn’t joking about the knife. He was messing with me, but he wasn’t joking. I couldn’t say anything. All I could do was paint on a smile, force out a laugh and let him put his arms around me. Even nowadays he was still sometimes lovely to me. Those times were precious. Those times were what made the rest of it bearable. And now I knew he had a back-up plan for the times when it wasn’t bearable. The times when I thought about escape. He had found a way to make sure I would never leave him.

For five days, I have been visiting my children.

I make them breakfast, I take them to school. After work I go to my home and make them dinner. I supervise homework and baths and story time and long-winded goodnights. I would clean the kitchen before I leave but my husband does it while I am upstairs – he does not want me there any longer than necessary, I suspect. He has spoken to me very little. In fact, only once – on that first night I came over. ‘The knives,’ he said sotto voce as the children changed out of their uniforms. ‘You took the freaking knives.
Are you mad?
’ Con’s arrival prevented my answer, which we both knew would have been: ‘Probably.’

‘You’re getting divorced, aren’t you?’ Vee says as I perch myself on her pink-duvet covered bed on that fifth night.

Am I?
a part of me wonders.
Does she know something I don’t?

‘Am I?’ I ask her.

She blusters while shrugging her shoulders, ‘Yeah, it’s obvious. One person moves out and then they get divorced.’

‘No one’s moved out,’ I say confidently, even though each day I have been taking a few more things with me. These things have moved beyond necessities and comforters, now they’re sliding into everyday items that I’d normally do without on holidays or short stays away from home. When I was packing I wasn’t sure what to take, having never had to pack before for my husband throwing me out for an unspecified amount of time. I’d already taken the large bottle of body moisturiser to use at the hotel. And a normal-size tube of toothpaste. My pack of cotton wool, my large face moisturiser and face wash had come with me yesterday. Today I was planning on taking a couple of towels and my dressing gown. The longer Evan didn’t initiate conversation, the more things I found I needed to bring.

‘But you’re not living here any more, Mum,’ Verity points out. ‘I know cos I see you leave at night and come back in the morning wearing something different. Even Conrad knows. He saw you weren’t in the big bed the other day.’

If Conrad knows, I’m surprised he hasn’t said something. Or has he, silently? He’s been clingy and ever so slightly babyish at night recently. Not wanting to let me go when I hug him goodnight, constantly asking me questions that are designed to prolong the night-night process, climbing out of bed to get things to show me. Of course he knows. Of course they both know. You can’t create the atmosphere that Evan and I have and not expect the kids to know. They’re children, not stupid.

‘OK, I’m not staying here at the moment.’

‘When are you coming back?’

I’m loathe to say, ‘When your father will talk to me’ because it
will
sound like the start of divorce to them. Especially to Verity. And we’re not there, we’re nowhere near there.

‘Not yet, anyway,’
whispers that little voice of my conscience.

I don’t even bother to argue with it, I just ignore it. ‘
Like your oh-so wonderful husband is doing to you,
’ it adds smugly.

‘I don’t know, Vee,’ I say. ‘I just . . . it’s complicated. Your father and I just have a few things to work out.’

‘See?’ she says, tugging the covers right up under her chin. ‘That’s what parents do. Eliza James’s parents did the same thing. Except her dad moved out cos her mum caught him kissing someone else. I think it was a man but Eliza won’t say. But her mum said they were “working a few things out” and her dad never came home and they got divorced. That’s what parents do. They say it’s complicated and then they get divorced.’

‘Really? How many parents have you had then? Because you seem very experienced in all this,’ I say, silently wishing she’d stop using the ‘D’ word in such a familiar, comfortable manner. The way Vee speaks, it seems we’re halfway to the courts already.

‘Ha ha, Mum,’ Vee says. I watch her stare intently at the poster on her wardrobe door, as if seeking comfort and understanding in it. Where most girls her age would have a band member or band or movie star, she has the periodic table. She likes the look of it, she said. The pretty colours and straight lines and orderliness are lovely to her. That is her excuse – the real reason is that my daughter is a big girly swot. Just like I was. She is just better at hiding it. ‘Did you kiss someone else?’

‘Much as I love you, sweetheart, you shouldn’t be asking me questions like that.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it crosses the line. It’s not the sort of thing you should ask me, as your mum, and it’s not the sort of thing I should answer.’

‘Why?’

I remember wanting to ban that word from her vocabulary when she was a toddler. Every child goes through the ‘Why?’ stage, but Verity’s was relentless. Even the ubiquitous, ‘Because it is’ was not good enough for her. ‘But
why
?’ she’d persist until Evan and I were ready to pull our hair out. We were each constantly throwing each other to the wolves of Verity’s whys, finding ways to get out of the questioning, and it was almost always me who had to do the extra research to find the answer.

‘Look, Vee, love, if I did answer that question and you didn’t get the answer you wanted, it would just upset you. You’d start to worry on a whole new level to the one you’re worrying on right now, and that’s not for you to do. Not until you’re an adult and married and can at least stay up past nine o’clock on a school night. Do you see what I mean?’